Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will face the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week to answer questions about the platform's practices with users' data. Apparently, he's concluded that testifying to Congress is the right thing to do when your...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he would be "happy" to testify before Congress about Facebook's data privacy after revelations that it let third parties work with data on millions of its users for years, in potential violation...

Facebook to world: Sorry. World to Facebook: Doesn't cut it. Facebook news has become a cottage industry of bad PR headlines since the revelation that the company’s leaky data-sharing policies also extended to user data that it let...

Where was the crack that an engineer reported to the construction crew working on the pedestrian bridge that collapsed at Miami's Florida International University? Now that emergency responders have removed the six victims who were trapped under the...

After the 950-ton pedestrian bridge collapse at Miami's Florida International University Thursday, news reports are counting between six and seven fatalities so far and scores of injuries since the overpass walkway pancaked on the six-lane highway below. [caption...

President Donald Trump is set to highlight an infrastructure plan among the topics he’s expected to bring up during his first State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 30th. In the meantime, sources are floating trial balloons...

Ina Fried of Axios Login has an enviable and fun gig this week, covering the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where the latest hot tech is rolled out. It's good to read tech reporters who bring...

I used to think that 2014 was the year that Artificial Intelligence crested in the public's awareness with the release of Amazon's voice-activated assistant, Alexa, and others like it. The cylinder with a little bit of backtalk and...

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the 37-year-old publisher of the New York Times, who just took the reins from his father Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., posted a New Year's Day op-ed about the urgency of his mission and challenges the news...

More details on the Trump Administration's infrastructure plan came out just before Christmas. It’s setting up hopes that Congress will pass a bi-partisan infrastructure package in 2018. If one looks at the issue through the lens of which...

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year! For friends and family near and far. For veterans serving and away from family, for all workers on the job today, thank you and season's greetings. From the...

It's official: President Donald J. Trump put his signature on the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs bill Friday that represents $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for some 80 percent of taxpayers in the most sweeping overhaul of the...

[Updated 12/19/17] Excessive speed details are emerging after the Amtrak 501 train derailment near Olympia, Washington Monday. And it's sparked a flurry of articles about whether Positive Train Control technology could have prevented the wreck. The derailment at...

[Updated 12/16/17] Two very big developments hit the news Thursday that tell us as much about the state of media, entertainment, news and culture as they do the future of media and society. For one, Walt Disney's $52.4-billion...

The latest on the would-be suicide bomber who reportedly botched his attempted terror attack: Per the NYPD: UPDATE: Akayed Ullah, the suspect arrested in yesterday’s terror attack in NYC, has been charged with the following: • Criminal Possession...

All eyes on are on Congress this week as House and Senate conference committees hammer out differences in their Tax Reform/Tax Cut bills and aim to pass historic legislation by the end of the year. President Donald Trump...

Forecasters say the Santa Ana wind event whipping up the destructive blazes that leveled homes, highways and major swaths of Southern California infrastructure is the strongest of its kind this year. President Donald Trump declared a state of...

Wildfires raging in southern California have destroyed hundreds of homes; others in the Bel-Air area are reportedly ablaze. The morning commute looked like a scene from a disaster movie. L.A. Times: "The fire also caused massive gridlock along one...

[Updated]: The current glut in natural gas and lowered prices for the commodity is driving a South African energy firm to shutter plans for a Liquified Natural Gas plant in Louisiana worth up to $14 billion. Industry watchers...

[Updates prior version]: Meredith Corporation made its acquisition of Time, Inc., official Monday, in a deal valued at about $2.8 billion. It includes $650 million in preferred equity commitment from Koch Equity Development (KED), the finance arm of...

The Federal Communications Commission made its plans to undo the Obama-era "Net Neutrality" rules official Tuesday, saying it will roll back the regulations that govern how internet service providers price and deliver their services. The vote is scheduled...

AT&T and the Department of Justice are headed to federal court over antitrust issues with its Time Warner merger. The stakes look as high as 1984, when the DoJ won its antitrust case and broke up Ma Bell. Now the...

[Updated 11/19/17] This "About New York" column by Jim Dwyer in the New York Times about the woeful experience that the New York City subway is these days brought back to mind all those $20 cab rides I...

Shell Chemicals has broken ground on a $6-billion ethane cracker plant in Potter Township in Pennsylvania's Beaver County north of Pittsburgh, which is expected to create about 6,000 construction jobs and some 600 permanent ones when it goes online. It's...

The New York Thruway's budget is holding the line on toll hikes in its 2018 budget. The Times Herald-Record, reporting from Albany on the authority, says: "The New York State Thruway Authority adopted a 2018 budget Monday that...

It's hard to ignore the comments about social media coming from one of the founders of Facebook, Sean Parker, in a recent interview with Axios's Mike Allen. He's become a "conscientious objector" about social media. We'll take that...

California's wildfires, day eight: More than 40,000 people are out of their homes, reportedly down from 100,000; the death toll is at 41, mostly in Sonoma and Napa Counties. My brother and sister in-law live in Mendocino County....

[Updated 10/14/17] California's wildfires have reportedly claimed 36 lives in Napa and Sonoma County's wine country after laying waste to homes, businesses and utilities with a swift and brutal devastation in what is becoming annus horribilis for major swaths of the...

Nicholas Carr has done it again. The best-selling author and leading light chronicling technology and digital media's impact on our way of life, our way of thinking—our brain function even—published a thought piece in the Saturday WSJ that...

The news this week that AOL would be ending its Instant Messaging service after a 20-year run deserves a comment or two on its cultural impact during its heyday in the late 90s and early aughts. In a...

Editors in one of the newsrooms I worked in often joked that we should sound a warning alarm when reporters start to do math. This was our way of poking fun at ourselves and a profession populated by...

President Donald Trump's comments Tuesday about Puerto Rico's $72-billion debt being "wiped out" sent bond markets into a tizzy Wednesday, and, in the process, got the issue of the hurricane-ravaged island's finances back into the discussion as it...

[Updated to reflect casualties and injured] This story doesn't easily slot into any topics that SL2R blog covers, but when the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history happens in Las Vegas, which it did late Sunday during a...

[UPDATED 10/1] After documenting the scale of the infrastructure damage to Southeast Texas and Florida from hurricanes Harvey and Irma, respectively, as a way to keep up with the efforts to rebuild infrastructure, I've been compiling notes on...

A week after Mexico City's magnitude 7.1 earthquake, with the heartbreaking search and rescue for children in a school whose roof pancaked, and over 326 people dead from the quake, the ripples from the hit in the earthquake-prone...

[UPDATED SEPT. 22] Puerto Rico is an island without electricity today after Hurricane Maria pummeled the U.S. territory on Wednesday when the Category 4 storm made landfall. The devastation is massive. The U.S. Virgin Islands also sustained damage...

Amazing doesn't quite sum up the sheer power of Hurricane Irma, as the world watches the former Category 5 hurricane continue wreaking its destruction in the southeast after slamming into Florida twice as a Category 4 hurricane Sunday....

After watching Hurricane Harvey's devastation in southeast Texas last week, we thought we'd seen a storm to top all storms for years to come. The initial damage estimates from Harvey's hit on greater Houston and parts of Louisiana...

The Tappan Zee bridge project in New York's Westchester County is scheduled to open its westbound lane to traffic on Friday, Aug. 25th, according to the New York Thruway, the authority overseeing the project. And they're going to...

At 61 stories high, the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco now dominates the city's skyline. And not all San Franciscans are happy about it. One local architecture critic calls it a building that belongs in New York or...

Electronics giant Foxconn Technology Group, a major product supplier to Apple, Microsoft and Intel, made news this week when it announced a $10 billion expansion of its operations in southeastern Wisconsin to make flat-panel (LCD) displays and other...

The U.S. construction industry's current expansion "still has legs" and is looking at 3% overall growth in 2017 — and 5% if you take out the more volatile sectors, says Dodge Data & Analytics chief economist Robert Murray. But...

[Updated 7/11/17]: A 2,000-member newspaper alliance is asking Congress for a pass on antitrust laws so it can engage in a kind of collusion to counter the dominance of the Google News/Facebook platform duopoly. The newspapers' ask is...

Taking in President Donald Trump's speech in Poland on Thursday, I was reminded of my early childhood years in Germany where my father, a military pilot, was stationed during the height of the Cold War (back when it...

Of all the retrospectives in the tech press this week about the iPhone's decade of cultural impact 10 years after its launch on June 29, and the backstory of how they got to launch, the WSJ's video of...

It's hard to keep up with the troubles at CNN these days, what with a failed hit piece against an associate of President Trump, which it had to retract (or face potential legal action), that led to resignations...

Germany is legendary for its apprenticeship and trade school programs in partnership with industry that confer high-level skill-sets on graduates and major earning power in manufacturing and skilled trades. For too many years, vocational-technical training schools in the...

Amazon the everything/media/grocery/potentially collaboration store made waves today when it announced a $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods Market Inc., which roiled the stocks of retailers who sell groceries, such as Wal-Mart and grocery chains such as Kroger....

President Trump closed out his administration's Infrastructure Week with a speech at the Department of Transportation that had all the elements of a solid event: Great speech-writing, a bi-partisan issue in the need to fix crumbling infrastructure around...

The Trump Administration is reportedly putting the President's Bully Pulpit to work this week with a series of announcements and tours focusing on critical infrastructure issues across the United States. First up, reports the Washington Post, will be...

To watch the fascinating video of a drone swarm released by the Department of Defense this week is to see life not only imitate science-fiction movies, but also show us how far-ahead in real-life these robotic swarms are....

FMI, a management consulting and investment banking firm focused on engineering and construction, infrastructure and the built environment. has come out with its forecast for non-residential construction for 2017 and it dovetails with other forecasts at about 6%...

I was thrilled to have been invited to construction data firm Dodge Data & Analytics' Construction Outlook update in New York City recently. Dodge prepared the update to reflect the priorities, outlook and improved business sentiment under the...

Updated: E&ENews is reporting of revived bi-partisan efforts in the House to introduce new bills to fund infrastructure spending. "Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the ranking member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced legislation to raise the gas...